MILK
Three takes on Gus Van Sant's new film

Howard Schumann:

In Milk, taking a break from the experimental dream-like cinema that marked Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park, director Gus Van Sant uses conventional biopic techniques to depict the life of Harvey Milk, the San Francisco entrepreneur who became the first openly gay man elected to public office. Employing a less-than-effective framing device that shows Milk talking into a tape recorder at the beginning and end, the film also relies on archival footage to make its point, showing police abuses against gays, and then Diane Feinstein announcing the assassination of Milk and Mayor Moscone outside San Francisco’s City Hall in 1979.

Borrowing one of Milk’s frequently used introductions to his speeches, the tagline for the film might be “I’m Gus Van Sant and I’m here to recruit you.” In the film, Van Sant wants to introduce Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) to a new generation who know him only as a footnote and, in the process, to gain mainstream adherents for the cause of gay rights. In that, he largely succeeds, though the film tends to reinforce homophobic stereotypes by allowing overly effeminate and flamboyant characters to dominate. Sean Penn’s polished performance as Harvey Milk is the highlight of the film and one sure to be remembered at Oscar time.

He makes the outspoken businessman a plausible and even lovable hero despite his insecurities. Also impressive is Josh Brolin as Supervisor Dan White and Emile Hirsch as street-walker turned political activist Cleve Jones. Opening in New York in 1970, Milk touches briefly on Harvey’s pickup of a much younger Scott Smith (James Franco), at a subway station, and follows their relationship to their establishment of a camera store on Castro Street in San Francisco. Though Scott was Milk’s live-in lover for many years and ultimately his first campaign manager, little attempt is made to show him or other peripheral characters in much depth, identifying them only by their sexuality and support of the movement that Harvey built from the bottom up.

Depicting the growth of the gay community in the area that centered on Castro Street, Van Sant captures the entrepreneurial spirit of the gay businesses that flourished on the street, yet he avoids the not-so-attractive aspects of the area that became in essence a sexual ghetto – its conformity of dress and speech, the proliferation of gay bars and bath houses in the neighborhood, and its toll of alienated and depressed inhabitants. Harvey’s mission from the outset of his political career was to encourage homosexuals to come out of the closet. “The blacks”, he said, “did not win their rights by sitting quietly in the back of the bus. They got off! Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets... We are coming out! We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions! We are coming out to tell the truth about gays!”

Milk’s two losing campaigns for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and his close defeat in his race for the State Assembly did not dim his determination or sense of purpose, however; yet it was only when districts were reapportioned to ensure neighborhood preferences that Milk was able win election as a Supervisor. He became more than a one-issue official, lending his support to unions and the urban poor, his populism reflecting the basic belief that rebuilding neighborhoods was essential to achieving the American dream. Milk organized his constituency into an effective political force which effectively faced the challenge of fighting Proposition 6, a statewide initiative to prohibit gays from teaching in the public schools, effectively legalizing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

While Milk is a message movie that unabashedly promotes a point of view, it transcends didacticism to become a human statement about the struggle of all people to achieve dignity, acceptance, and basic human rights, and its depiction of the torchlight parade of 30,000 people to San Francisco City Hall on the night of the assassination is a magic moment. The film begins and ends with Milk expressing his love for another human being, a statement that the success of the gay rights movement will be ensured only when people are seen as human before they are seen as gay or straight. Ironically, that may happen only when the gay and the straight identities are subsumed into a broader understanding of what it truly means to be human.

©2008 Howard Schumann

*

Les Phillips:

The first gay political hero biopic is a cultural event. Is it too grudging to note, first off, that Milk is a thoroughly conventional film? The director of Gerry and Elephant is nowhere in evidence; this film is directed by the man who made Good Will Hunting. As a mainstream director, Van Sant is merely competent; he stays out of the story's way. When you've got a powerful tale and a perfect star performance, that may be just as well.

Sean Penn is impeccable as Harvey Milk. I don't say "astoniishing" or "stupendous" because there are no pyrotechnics here, none of the hot flashes of other Sean Penn performances. There's an ease and elegance to Penn's acting, from the very first frame; no false moves or wrong moments. And Emile Hirsch is wonderful as Cleve Jones, the teenage hustler turned activist; it's a creative, energetic performance that doesn't go over the top. (Hirsch is criminally underrated.)

The screenplay is sentimental and a bit dumbed-down. There's an unnecessary framing device: Milk talking into a tape recorder, looking back on his career. The film begins with dusty archival clips of gay men being arrested in bars; after that, the famous footage of Dianne Feinstein at City Hall, announcing to the world that an elected official has just shot and killed two other elected officials; no other framing is necessary. A tiny subplot involving a gay teenager from Minnesota is mawkish; a real misfire. I sat and thought about these problems, and about how Diego Luna hasn't figured out how to capture Jack, Milk's lover; and about how Josh Brolin's performance (much praised) conspires with the screenplay to make Dan White seem one-dimensional. I winced slightly at the little nuggets of agitprop that are sprinkled throughout the story. I kept wishing for a better movie--Harvey Milk deserves a better movie. Do we even need this movie? Isn't The Times of Harvey Milk all we need?

...and then Van Sant re-enacts the candlelight march after Milk's shooting -- thousands of men and women walking quietly up Market Street, from the Castro to City Hall, bearing witness--and several people in the theatre are crying, and I'm one of them. Documentaries are one thing; then there's dramatization, acting, catharsis...

Milk is flawed, deeply moving -- and essential, in every sense of
the word.

©2008 Les Phillips

*

Chris Knipp:

Milk is another powerful mainstream American movie about gay experience. It seems destined to have the same kind of influence on the public mind as Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, which, respectively, describe the AIDS crisis and tell a great tragic gay love story. Both of them were prominent at Oscar time. Like them this isn't quite a great film, but is nonetheless an important one.

In Milk the topic widens to gay politics and gay rights. "These are not 'issues,'" Harvey Milk tells a major opponent, "these are our lives we're fighting for." His own life peaked at a transformative place and time for homosexuals, San Francisco in the 1970's. A prominent San Francisco Supervisor assassinated by the disgruntled and deranged conservative Supervisor Dan White in the City Hall in 1978, Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. He was a gay activist who gained fame and political clout. "A homosexual with power--that's scary," Milk tells Mayor Moscone--an ally with whom he sparred, and who was assassinated with him.

If he hadn't been killed early in his political career Milk might have traded his jocular title of "Mayor of Castro Street" (the city's predominantly gay district) for the formal one of Mayor of San Francisco. Dan White himself predicted this.

While Milk sought the whole city's attention with a seemingly trivial cause--a "pooper scooper" law forcing citizens to clean up after their dogs, he has come to represent a profile in courage--a man willing to face up to Orange County bigots on their own turf, who insisted all gays must come out of the closet to unite in strength. The film doesn't idealize the man; his private life is obviously messy, and despite his preaching, he was in the closet to his own parents. His lover leaves him, and a new Latino boyfriend (Diego Luna) is totally unstable.

Every gay advance seems to bring on a backlash. After the 1969 Stonewall Riots (alluded to in news footage as Milk opens) more gay men and lesbians were out and proud, but Anita Bryant, the Florida orange juice advertiser and right-wing Christian gay basher, was on the rampage campaigning for measures all over the country to remove gay rights. In California in 1978 one of her many causes was the Briggs Initiative, Proposition 6, which would have mandated firing all the state's gay teachers.

Today, while the election of an African-American as President makes the US look more friendly toward minorities, anti-gay measures are still on ballots in many states at election times. On the same day that Obama was elected, Californian gay people saw the passage of Proposition 8, put over by Mormon money, to outlaw gay marriage in the state.

Leaving behind the hermetic, personal wavelength of his best film My Own Private Idaho and the stylized elegance of his recent quartet, Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park, Van Sant returns to a conventional mode closer to his Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester--but this time with more scope and more commitment to taking a stand as a gay man with a wide audience. The writer for the film is Justin Lance Black, an ex-Mormon and writer for several gay-related films and the TV series about a polygamist Mormon, Big Love.

Harvey Milk (a nicely modulated Sean Penn) first appears recording a tape testament in his final year of life, a scene that bookends the film. Penn is noted for emotionally overwrought roles, but his Harvey Milk is someone who rarely loses his cool or his sense of humor even when he meets the hostile Briggs or regularly has to deal with his clueless, inept opponent Dan White (a fine Josh Brolin). Milk mocked the right-wingers' fiction that homosexuals are pedophiles who want to proselytize youth--that gays are made not born--by opening public addresses with, "My name is Harvey Milk and I want to recruit you." It's a line often repeated in the film.

The movie, as is the way with conventional biopics, paints its subject's life in broad strokes. He meets his young lover Scott Smith (an appealing James Franco) while a corporate drone in New York. They decide to start a new life in San Francisco and start a camera shop together on Castro Street. Before long Milk is in the thick of political activity, talking to Teamsters and cutting off his beard and pony tail and donning suit and tie to meet the general public.

Milk emerges as a true politician. Moscone compares him to Boss Tweed. Through leading a successful boycott of Coors beer for the Teamsters, he forges strong links with labor. Scenes are crowded with political coworkers, and resident cute boys.

Most of all the movie is a picture of community organizing and campaign management. This is told in broad strokes too, but there are many specific personalities. Milk ran for office many times before redistricting made a clear win possible. Scotty is his manager, until he can't bear another losing campaign and moves out. Next Milk "recruits" a cocky young runaway and street hustler, Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch), who claims he can get a thousand gay men on the street on demand and also boasts "I don't do losing." With his new well-connected lesbian campaign manager Anne Kronenberg (Alison Pill) he secures endorsements from the Bay Guardian and even the Chronicle, and wins handily.

It's unusual for a mainstream film to get so much into the practical details of local politics. At the same time Jack is jealous of Scott and Cleve and moving toward a meltdown, and Dan White, having his own more dangerous meltdown, is waiting in the wings.

As a San Franciscan I wish the atmosphere of the tragic finale had been properly amplified by a horrified awareness of the Jim Jones massacre, the news of which had emerged barely a week before White shot Moscone and Milk. But otherwise this stands as an essential piece of gay and California history, and Van Sant's fluent, lively film couldn't come at a better time.

©2008 Chris Knipp
CineScene